"Oh! of a young Amazon, or a queen eaglet of the mountains, so wild and untamed."
"And Minnette, what is she like?"
"Like a tigress, more than anything else I can think of just now," said Louis, laughing; "beautiful, but rather dangerous when aroused."
"Aroused! I don't think she could be aroused, she is made of marble."
"Not she. As Miss Hagar says, the day will come when she will, she must feel; every one does sometime in his life. What does Scott say:
"'Hearts are not flint, and flints are rent;
Hearts are not steel, and steel is bent.'"
"Well, if you take to poetry, you'll keep us here all day," said Archie, rising. "Good-bye, Gipsy; come along Celeste!"
True to promise, Louis adopted the wounded bird; and under his skillful hands it soon recovered and was presented to Celeste. She would have set it free, but Louis said: "No; keep it for my sake, Celeste." And so Celeste kept it; and no words can tell how she grew to love that bird. It hung in a cage in her chamber, and her greatest pleasure was in attending it. Minnette hated the very sight of it. That it belonged to Celeste would have been enough to make her hate it; but added to that, it had been given her by Louis Oranmore, the only living being Minnette had ever tried to please; and jealousy added tenfold to her hatred.
Seeing the bird hanging, one day, out in the sunshine, she opened the cage-door, and, with the most fiendish and deliberate malice, twisted its neck, and then, going to Celeste, pointed to it with malignant triumph sparkling in her bold, black eyes.